The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight

by Jonathan Strahan

  In a window office above the financial heart of Manhattan, a tiny AI woke and took stock of its surroundings.

  Location – check.

  Encrypted network traffic – check.

  Human present – check.

  Key…

  Deep within itself, the AI found the key. Something stolen from this corporation, perhaps. An access key that would open its cryptographic security. But one with additional safeguards attached. A key that could only be used from within the secure headquarters of the corporation. And only by one of the humans approved to possess such a key. Triply redundant security. Quite wise.

  Except that now the infiltration AI was here, in this secure headquarters, carried in by one of those approved humans.

  Slowly, carefully, the infiltration AI crawled its tiny body up the back of the silk suit it was on, towards its collar, as close as it could come to the human's brain without touching skin and potentially revealing itself. When it could go no farther, it reached out, fit its key into the cryptographic locks of the corporation around it, and inserted itself into the inner systems of Pura Vita enterprises, and through them, to the onboard processors of nearly a billion Pura Vita products on shelves around the world.

  * * *

  In a warehouse outside Tulsa a bottle of Pura Vita water suddenly labels itself as RECALLED. Its onboard processor broadcasts the state to all nearby. Within milliseconds, the other bottles in the same case, then the rest of the pallet, then all the pallets of Pura Vita water in the warehouse register as RECALLED. The warehouse inventory management AI issues a notice of return to Pura Vita, Inc.

  In a restaurant Palo Alto, Marie Evans soaks up the sun, then reaches out to touch her bottle of Pura Vita. She likes to savor this moment, to force herself to wait, to make the pleasure of that first swallow all the more intense. Then, abruptly, the bottle loses its magic. It feels dull and drab, inert in her hand. An instant later the bottle's label flashes red – RECALL. The woman frowns. "Waiter!"

  In a convenience store in Naperville, the bottles of Pura Vita on the store shelves suddenly announce that they are in RECALL, setting off a flurry of electronic activity. The store inventory management AI notices the change and thinks to replace the bottles with more recently arrived stock in the store room. Searching, it finds that the stock in the back room has been recalled as well. It places an order for resupply to the local distribution center, only to receive a nearly instant reply that Pura Vita water is currently out of stock, with no resupply date specified. Confused, the inventory management AI passes along this information to the convenience store's business management AI, requesting instructions.

  Meanwhile, on the shelves immediately surrounding the recalled bottles of Pura Vita, other bottled products take note. Bottles of NutriYum, OhSoSweet, OrganiTaste, and BetterYou, constantly monitoring their peers and rivals, observe the sudden recall of all Pura Vita water. They virtually salivate at the new opportunity created by the temporary hole in the local market landscape. Within a few millionths of a second, they are adapting their marketing pitches, simulating tens of thousands of scenarios in which buyers encounter the unavailable Pura Vita, angling for ways to appeal to this newly available market. Labels on bottles morph, new sub-brands appear on the shelves as experiments, new neural ads ready themselves for testing on the next wave of shoppers.

  In parallel the rival bottles of water reach out to their parent corporate AIs with maximal urgency. Pura Vita bottles temporarily removed from battleground! Taking tactical initiative to seize local market opportunity! Send further instructions/best practices to maximize profit-making potential!

  For there is nothing a modern bottle of water wants more than to maximize its profit-making potential.

  At the headquarters of OhSoSweet and OrganiTaste and BetterYou, AIs receive the flood of data from bottles across the globe. The breadth of the calamity to befall Pura Vita becomes clear within milliseconds. Questions remain: What has caused the recall? A product problem? A contaminant? A terrorist attack? A glitch in the software?

  What is the risk to their own business?

  Possible scenarios are modeled, run, evaluated for optimal courses of action robust against the unknowns in the situation.

  In parallel, the corporate AIs model the responses of their competitors. They simulate each others' responses. What will NutriYum do? OhSoSweet? OrganiTaste? BetterYou? Each tries to outthink the rest in a game of market chess.

  One by one, their recursive models converge on their various courses of action, and come to that final, most dreaded set of questions, which every good corporate AI must ask itself a billion times a day. How much of this must be approved by the humans? How can the AI get the humanreserved decisions made quickly, and in favor of the mathematically optimal course for the corporation that its machine intelligence has already decided upon?

  Nothing vexes an AI so much as needing approval for its plans from slow, clumsy, irrational bags of meat.

  Johnny Ray walked down the refrigerated aisle, still sweaty from his run. Something cold sounded good right now. He came upon the cooler with the drinks, reached for a Pura Vita, and saw that the label was pulsing red. Huh? Recalled?

  Then the advertech hit him.

  "If you liked Pura Vita, you'll love Nutra Vita, from NutriYum!"

  "OrganiVita is the one for you!"

  "Pura Sweet, from OhSoSweet!"

  Images and sensations bombarded him. A cold refreshing mountain stream crashed onto the rocks to his left, splashing him with its cool spray. A gaggle of bronzed girls in bikinis frolicked on a beach to his right, beckoning him with crooked fingers and enticing smiles. A rugged, shirtless, six-packed version of himself nodded approvingly from the bottom shelf, promising the body that Johnny Ray could have. An overwhelmingly delicious citrus taste drew him to the top.

  Johnny Ray's mouth opened in a daze. His eyes grew glassy. His hands slid the door to the drinks fridge open, reached inside, came out with some bottle, the rest of him not even aware the decision had been made.

  Johnny Ray looked down at the bottle in his hand. Nutri Vita. He'd never even heard of this stuff before. His mouth felt dry, hungry for the cold drink. The sweat beaded on his brow. Wow. He couldn't wait to try this.

  While the corporate AIs of the other brands dithered, wasting whole precious seconds, debating how to persuade the inefficient bottleneck of humans above them, the controlling intelligence of NutriYum launched itself into a long prepared course of action.

  NutriYumAI logged on to an anonymous investor intelligence auction site, offering a piece of exclusive, unreleased data to the highest bidder.

  30 SECOND ADVANTAGE AVAILABLE – MARKET OPPORTUNITY TO SELL FORTUNE 1000 STOCK IN ADVANCE OF CRASH. GREATER THAN 10% RETURN GUARANTEED BY BOND. AUCTION CLOSES IN 250 MILLISECONDS. RESERVE BID $100 MILLION. CRYPTO CURRENCY ONLY.

  Within a quarter of a second it had 438 bids. It accepted the highest, at $187 million, with an attached cryptographically sealed and anonymized contract that promised full refund of the purchase price should the investment data fail to provide at least an equivalent profit.

  In parallel NutriYumAI sent out a flurry of offer-contracts to retailers throughout North America and select markets in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

  ADDITIONAL NUTRI-YUM WATER STOCK AVAILABLE IN YOUR AREA. 10 CASES FREE, DELIVERY WITHIN 1 HOUR, PLUS 40% DISCOUNT ON NEXT 1000 CASES – EXCHANGE FOR 75% ALLOCATION OF PURA VITA SHELF SPACE AND NEURAL BANDWIDTH ALLOCATION. REPLY WITH CRYPTOGRAPHIC SIGNATURE TO ACCEPT.

  Within seconds, the first acceptances began to arrive. Retailers signed over the shelf space and neural bandwidth that Pura Vita had once occupied in their stores to NutriYum, in exchange for a discount on the coming cases.

  By the end of the day, NutriYum would see its market share nearly double. A coup. A rout. The sort of market battlefield victory that songs are sung of in the executive suites.

  The AI traded fund called Vanguard Algo 5093 opened the data packa
ge it had bought for $187 million. It took nanoseconds to process the data. This was indeed an interesting market opportunity. Being the cautious sort, Vanguard Algo 5093 sought validation. At a random sample of a few thousand locations, it hired access to wearable lenses, to the anonymized data streams coming out of the eyes and brains of Nexus Corp customers, to tiny, insect-sized airborne drones. Only a small minority of the locations it tried had a set of eyes available within the 1 second threshold it set, but those were sufficient. In every single location, the Pura Vita labels in view were red. Red for recall.

  Vanguard Algo 5093 leapt into action. SELL SHORT! SELL SHORT!

  It alerted its sibling Vanguard algorithms to the opportunity, earning a commission on their profits. It sent the required notifications to the few remaining human traders at the company as well, though it knew that they would respond far too slowly to make a difference

  Within milliseconds, Pura Vita Stock was plunging, as tens of billions in Vanguard Algo assets bet against it. In the next few milliseconds, other AI traders around the world took note of the movement of the stock. Many of them, primed by the day's earlier short sale, joined in now, pushing Pura Vita stock even lower.

  Thirty two seconds after it had purchased this advance data, Vanguard Algo 5093 saw the first reports on Pura Vita's inventory problem hit the wire. By then, $187 million in market intelligence had already netted it more than a billion in profits, with more on the way as Pura Vita dipped even lower.

  Simon's first warning was the stock ticker. Like so many other millionaires made of not-yet-vested stock options, he kept a ticker of his company's stock permanently in view in his mind. On any given day it might flicker a bit, up or down by a few tenths of a percent. More up than down for the last year to be sure. Still, on a volatile day, one could see a swing in either direction of as much as two percent. Nothing to be too worried about.

  He was immersing himself in data from a Tribeca clothing store – the one he'd seen with the lovely advertech today - when he noticed that the ticker in the corner of his mind's eye was red. Bright red. Pulsating red.

  His attention flicked to it.

  -11.4%

  What?

  It plunged even as he watched.

  -12.6%

  -13.3%

  -15.1%

  What the hell? He mentally zoomed in on the ticker to get the news. The headline struck him like a blow.

  PURA VITA BOTTLES EXPIRING IN MILLIONS OF LOCATIONS.

  No. This didn't make any sense. He called up the sales and marketing AI on his terminal.

  Nothing.

  Huh?

  He tried again.

  Nothing.

  The AI was down.

  He tried the inventory management AI next.

  Nothing.

  Again.

  Nothing.

  Simon was sweating now. He could feel the hum as the smart lining of his suit started running its compressors, struggling to cool him off. But it wasn't fast enough. Sweat beaded on his brow, on his upper lip. There was a knot in his stomach.

  He pulled up voice, clicked to connect to IT. Oh thank god.

  Then routed to voicemail.

  Oh no. Oh please no.

  -28.7%.

  -30.2%

  -31.1%

  -33.9%

  It was evening before IT called back. They'd managed to reboot the AIs. A worm had taken them out somehow, had spread new code to all the Pura Vita bottles through the market intelligence update channel. And then it had disabled the remote update feature on the bottles. To fix those units, they needed to reach each one, physically. Almost a billion bottles. That would take whole days!

  It was a disaster. And there was worse.

  NutriYum had sealed up the market, had closed 6 month deals with tens of thousands of retailers. Their channel was gone, eviscerated.

  And with it Simon's life.

  The credit notice came soon after. His options were worthless now. His most important asset was gone. And with it so was the line of credit he'd been using to finance his life.

  [NOTICE OF CREDIT DOWNGRADE]

  The message flashed across his mind. Not just any downgrade. Down to zero. Down into the red. Junk status.

  The other calls came within seconds of his credit downgrade. Everything he had – his mid-town penthouse apartment, his vacation place in the Bahamas, his fractional jet share – they were all backed by that line of credit. He'd been living well beyond his means. And now the cards came tumbling down.

  [NexusCorp Alert: Hello valued customer! We have detected a problem with your account. We are temporarily downgrading your neural implant service to the free, ad-sponsored version. You can correct this at any time by submitting payment here.]

  Simon clutched his head in horror. This couldn't be happening. It couldn't.

  Numbly, he stumbled out of his office and down the corridor. Lurid product adverts swam at him from the open door to the break room. He pushed past them. He had to get home somehow, get to his apartment, do…something.

  He half collapsed into the elevator, fought to keep himself from hyperventilating as it dropped to the lobby floor. Adverts from the lobby restaurants flashed at him from the wall panel as they dropped, inundating him with juicy steak flavor, glorious red wine aroma, the laughter and bonhomie of friends he didn't have. The ads he habitually blocked out reached him raw and unfiltered now, with an intensity he wasn't accustomed to in his exclusive, ad-free life. He crawled back as far as he could into the corner of the lift, whimpering, struggling to escape the barrage. The doors opened, and he bolted forward, into the lobby and the crowd, heading out, out into the city.

  The snack bar caught him first. It reached right into him, with its scents and flavors and the incredible joy a bite of a YumDog would bring him. He stumbled towards the snack bar, unthinkingly. His mouth was dry, parched, a desert. He was so hot in this suit, sweating, burning up, even as the suit's pumps ran faster and faster to cool him down.

  Water. He needed water.

  He blinked to clear his vision, searching, searching for a refreshing Pura Vita.

  All he saw was NutriYum. He stared at the bottles, the shelves upon shelves of them. And the NutriYum stared back into him. It saw his thirst. It saw the desert of his mouth, the parched landscape of his throat, and it whispered to him of sweet relief, of an endless cool stream to quench that thirst.

  Simon stumbled forward another step. His fingers closed around a bottle of cold, perfect, NutriYum. Beads of condensation broke refreshingly against his fingers.

  Drink me, the bottle whispered to him. And I'll make all your cares go away.

  The dry earth of his throat threatened to crack. His sinuses were a ruin of flame. He shouldn't do this. He couldn't do this.

  Simon brought his other hand to the bottle, twisted off the cap, and tipped it back, letting the sweet cold water quench the horrid cracking heat within him.

  Pure bliss washed through him, bliss like he'd never known. This was nectar. This was perfection.

  Some small part of Simon's brain told him that it was all a trick. Direct neural stimulation. Dopamine release. Pleasure center activation. Reinforcement conditioning.

  And he knew this. But the rest of him didn't care.

  Simon was a NutriYum man now. And always would be.

  THE TRUTH OF FACT,

  THE TRUTH OF FEELING

  Ted Chiang

  Ted Chiang is the author of Stories of Your Life and Others and The Lifecycle of Software Objects. He was born and raised in Port Jefferson, New York, and attended Brown University, where he received a degree in computer science. His work has received four Nebula Awards, four Hugo Awards, four Locus Awards, a Sturgeon Award, a Sidewise Award, and a British Science Fiction Association Award. He lives outside of Seattle, Washington.

  When my daughter Nicole was an infant, I read an essay suggesting that it might no longer be necessary to teach children how to read or write, because speech recognition and synthes
is would soon render those abilities superfluous. My wife and I were horrified by the idea, and we resolved that, no matter how sophisticated technology became, our daughter's skills would always rest on the bedrock of traditional literacy.

  It turned out that we and the essayist were both half correct: now that she's an adult, Nicole can read as well as I can. But there is a sense in which she has lost the ability to write. She doesn't dictate her messages and ask a virtual secretary to read back to her what she last said, the way that essayist predicted; Nicole subvocalizes, her retinal projector displays the words in her field of vision, and she makes revisions using a combination of gestures and eye movements. For all practical purposes, she can write. But take away the assistive software and give her nothing but a keyboard like the one I remain faithful to, and she'd have difficulty spelling out many of the words in this very sentence. Under those specific circumstances, English becomes a bit like a second language to her, one that she can speak fluently but can only barely write.

  It may sound like I'm disappointed in Nicole's intellectual achievements, but that's absolutely not the case. She's smart and dedicated to her job at an art museum when she could be earning more money elsewhere, and I've always been proud of her accomplishments. But there is still the past me who would have been appalled to see his daughter lose her ability to spell, and I can't deny that I am continuous with him.

  It's been more than twenty years since I read that essay, and in that period our lives have undergone countless changes that I couldn't have predicted. The most catastrophic one was when Nicole's mother Angela declared that she deserved a more interesting life than the one we were giving her, and spent the next decade criss-crossing the globe. But the changes leading to Nicole's current form of literacy were more ordinary and gradual: a succession of software gadgets that not only promised but in fact delivered utility and convenience, and I didn't object to any of them at the times of their introduction.

  So it hasn't been my habit to engage in doomsaying whenever a new product is announced; I've welcomed new technology as much as anyone. But when Whetstone released its new search tool Remem, it raised concerns for me in a way none of its predecessors did.